Former
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former Auburn head football coach
Pat Dye are in the news this week. One was named to the newly formed College
Football Playoff committee, and the other seems intent on chairing the old-as-time
We Often Mistake Gender Organs for Proof of Common Sense committee.
Rice
is the former, Dye the latter.
Those
already named to the 12-to-20ish-members committee include familiar football
names like Barry Alvarez, Pat Haden and Archie Manning. Dye came out of
the1980s long enough Monday to tell a Birmingham radio station that Rice was a
poor choice to be included because “to understand football,” he said, “you’ve
got to play with your hand in the dirt” and that “all she knows about football
is what somebody told her. Or what she read in a book, or what she saw on
television.”
Then
he spat, hit a woman over the head with a first-down marker, grabbed her by the
ponytail and dragged her backward 15 yards.
(Rice
would have learned little, by the way, watching Dye’s 5-6 and 5-5-1 teams in ’91
and ’92.)
Rice’s
committee will be responsible for selection of the four-team playoff to
determine college football’s “true champion.” This begins next year. Of course,
this won’t stop the argument of Who’s No. 1. I find this a joy; listening to the
arguing and complaining over the old polls I grew up with spoiled me. Now, the
argument is that the committee is tainted by a female woman who cannot
understand football, which at its best can get fairly complicated but even then
is not splitting the atom, much less trying to negotiate and reason with, oh,
let’s say, for starters, Russia or Afghanistan.
Some
information, then a quick observation:
Since
retiring from being four heartbeats away from the United States Presidency, Rice
is now a professor in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford, where she
was once provost.
Since
retiring from coaching football and athletics directering yet remaining one
heartbeat away from that Great Athletic Dormitory For Whistle-Wearin’ Guys in
the Sky, Dye has been a regular guest on various radio programs like the
nationally syndicated “Rick and Bubba Show,” during which he would guesstimate the
outcome of that week’s Southeastern Conference games.
“I
like Vandy and the points this week, Coach!” Bubba would say.
“Aw,
shoot, boy, Vandy couldn’t pull a sick kid off a bicycle,” Dye would retort. “A
boy who would pick Vandy to cover would pick Germany in a World War.”
I
paraphrase, but you get the picture.
That
said, I would be much more comfortable with Dye’s present gig than with Rice’s.
I am in no way enamored with the world of big business, politics or
administration. And I love me some Pat Dye. I just think that, at present, the
old College Football Hall of Famer can’t see the Rice for the long-cultivated chauvinistic
weeds. We’re talking reason and brain here, not body type.
Some
others on the committee haven’t played either, but they are male, and that
seems to carry a lot of weight with Dye, who I once ate ice cream and talked
country music with. He loves him some ice cream and some old country. We traded
great song titles and hummed bars of this or that. He knows ice cream. And he
knows country music.
True,
Rice ain’t Bo Jackson. But the ice-cream eatin’, country-music lovin’ Dye’s not
Elsie the Cow, either. (A FEMALE, by the way!) Nor is he Hank Sr.
And,
thank goodness, he’s not a U.S. diplomat.
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